Four Baltic projects win EU Innovation Fund backing
Four of the 77 net-zero projects selected by the EU Innovation Fund are in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia: an electrolyser, a low-carbon cement plant in Ventspils, a platinum refinery and a magnet factory. We look at what each one builds and why together they matter for Baltic hydrogen.
NEWS
PtXBaltic
11/12/20265 min read
Four. That's how many of the 77 net-zero projects picked by the European Commission on 19 October are in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The Innovation Fund is sharing €3.4 billion this round, and the Baltic share looks modest on paper. Then you read the list: an electrolyser at Latvia's national utility, a 500,000-tonne cement plant in Ventspils, a platinum refinery near Vilnius and a scale-up of Europe's first rare-earth magnet factory. We think that's a stronger hand than the headcount suggests.
The Baltic scorecard: four out of 77
The 2025 call opened in December 2025 and is paid for with EU Emissions Trading System revenue. Selected projects now go into grant agreement preparation, so nothing is signed yet. The Commission's list names H2-TIDAL (Latvenergo, hydrogen) and RE-MENT (Cemvision, cement) in Latvia, REFINIS-CRM (Refinis, platinum group metals) in Lithuania and GAUSS (Neo Performance Materials, permanent magnets) in Estonia.
Latvia gets two. Lithuania and Estonia get one each. Across the water, Finnlines' FIN-SWE-EC project was selected too: about 25 MWh of extra batteries on each of two RoPax ferries running Naantali–Kapellskär. It's a Finnish-Swedish project, but it shows the Baltic Sea becoming a test route in its own right.
Grant figures are thin so far. Reports put RE-MENT at up to €27.5 million and GAUSS at up to €126 million. We couldn't find confirmed amounts for H2-TIDAL or REFINIS-CRM, and we'd treat any number quoted for them as unverified until the grant agreements are signed.
H2-TIDAL: Latvenergo tests a new electrolyser design
Green hydrogen is still expensive and hard to get. H2-TIDAL is Latvia's most concrete move to change that so far. Latvenergo will build and run a 2 MW ceramic-based high-pressure alkaline electrolyser (CBAE), with hydrogen storage and distribution for transport and industrial users.
Two megawatts is small. The project sits in the Fund's small-scale category, and plenty of European electrolysers are a hundred times bigger. What makes it worth watching is the stack: a ceramic-based alkaline design that runs at high pressure, which can mean less compression after the electrolyser. The Commission expects it to avoid around 16,144 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in its first ten years. The public description doesn't name the stack supplier or the site, so we won't guess. It's also a separate track from Latvenergo's 2025 MoU with H2Pro on a possible 5 MW decoupled-electrolysis pilot.
Why care about 2 MW? Because of who's building it. Latvenergo runs Latvia's big hydropower plants and is adding wind across the Baltics. An electrolyser on its own system gives the market operating data, a permitting precedent and a real supply conversation with transport users. Latvia hasn't had that yet.
RE-MENT: a cement plant in Ventspils built on residues
Swedish startup Cemvision plans its first commercial-scale plant in Ventspils, making up to 500,000 tonnes of cement a year. The product is supersulfated cement made mostly from industrial by-products rather than limestone clinker. By the Commission's numbers it cuts CO₂ by 93.2% against traditional cement and avoids more than 3.1 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent over ten years. Trade press puts commissioning in 2028.
The commercial side is further along than you'd expect for a startup. Cemvision already runs demonstration production in Poland. Vattenfall has agreed to prioritise its Re-ment Massive cement for onshore wind foundations through its subcontractors. Siemens is working on automation and digital-twin design for the plants and says it'll be an early customer. And a partnership with Mannok, part of Turkey's Çimsa group, is aimed at multi-year offtake. Buyers before the factory. That's the order we like to see.
Why Ventspils makes sense for heavy clean industry
A cement plant running on residues needs bulk material coming in by ship, large volumes going out by ship, industrial land and a solid grid connection. A deep-water port with bulk terminals already has most of that. So the site choice says as much about the project as the grant does.
Ventspils has been pitching itself for years as a renewable energy and clean-industry port on the Kurzeme coast, near planned offshore wind. What it lacked was a big, bankable industrial tenant. A 500,000-tonne plant is exactly that. Heavy users tend to cluster, too: once one low-carbon process is operating in a port, the case for the next one (hydrogen, e-fuels, storage) gets easier to make to investors and permitting authorities. The weak spots to watch are grid capacity and residue logistics. That's where projects like this usually slip.
GAUSS: Estonia scales up Europe's magnet supply
Neo Performance Materials' GAUSS project brings rare-earth separation, metallisation and magnet manufacturing together in Estonia, with output of up to 3,000 tonnes of permanent magnets a year. A third is earmarked for EU offshore wind. The Commission credits it with more than 3.4 million tonnes of avoided CO₂-equivalent in ten years. The technical step is a closed-loop solvent-extraction process that replaces conventional nitrate routes.
It's an expansion, not a start-up. Neo's Narva magnet plant opened in September 2025 with 2,000 tonnes a year of Phase 1A capacity, about 30 km from its Silmet separation plant in Sillamäe. According to Engineering News, the Innovation Fund money, up to €126 million, pays for the next phase. Western magnet capacity is tiny, so a few thousand tonnes in Estonia counts for a lot.
REFINIS-CRM: Lithuania turns old catalysts into platinum
Refinis started in 2025 with a plant in Elektrėnai municipality that recycles spent car catalysts. REFINIS-CRM turns it into a full recycling and refining line: direct-current plasma smelting, a top-blown rotary converter and molecular recognition technology for the hydrometallurgical step, running as one continuous process. The target is about 8.21 tonnes a year of high-purity platinum, palladium and rhodium.
Europe gets much of its platinum group metals from mines in South Africa and Russia. Refining recycled metal in Lithuania keeps it inside the EU, which is what the Critical Raw Materials Act is asking member states to build.
The hydrogen link across all four
Only H2-TIDAL carries the hydrogen label. The other three still sit on the hydrogen supply chain. PEM electrolysers and fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst, so a European platinum refinery helps secure electrolyser supply. Offshore wind turbines need permanent magnets, and offshore wind is meant to power large-scale electrolysis around the Baltic Sea. A cement plant in an industrial port makes that port more attractive to the hydrogen and PtX users who'd come next.
So the Baltic story here is a set of parts that connect, from the metals inside an electrolyser to the port where the molecules get used. We find that more convincing than one oversized flagship would have been.
What this means for Baltic hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders
Baltic projects can win competitive EU money when they bring proven technology and named buyers; Cemvision's offtake deals and Neo's running plant are the evidence. Small demonstrators count as well. H2-TIDAL shows you don't need a 200 MW electrolyser to get onto the Innovation Fund list. And ports are where these projects come together, with Ventspils now holding a real anchor tenant.
These are selections, not signed grants, and most figures are the Commission's and the companies' own projections. We'll follow the grant signatures and construction milestones. If you're preparing a Baltic bid for the next Innovation Fund call or hydrogen auction, read these four applications' public summaries closely. They're the closest thing to a local benchmark we've got.
Source: Commission invests €3.4 billion in net-zero technology projects